Sztuka i Dokumentacja |nr 10| 2014

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Redaktor naczelny / Chief Editor – Łukasz Guzek

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Redaktor sekcji / Section Editor – “Art & Text: Conceptual Art” - Kristine Stiles Redakcja przypisów i bibliografi i / Notes & bibliographies

– Małgorzata Kaźmierczak

Sekretarz Redakcji / Managing Editor – Małgorzata Kaźmierczak

Redakcja / Editorial Board - Józef Robakowski, Aurelia Mandziuk-Zajączkowska, Adam Klimczak

Rada Naukowa / Board of Scholars – Ryszard W. Kluszczyński, Kristine Stiles, Anna Markowska, Slavka Sverakova, Leszek Brogowski, Bogusław Jasiński, Kazimierz Piotrowski, Tomasz Załuski, Tassilo von Blittersdorff , Tomasz Majewski Korekta w języku polskim / Polish proofreading – Beata Śniecikowska Korekta w języku angielskim / English proofreading – Anne Seagrave Projektowanie, skład / Design, typesetting – Norbert Trzeciak http://www.norberttrzeciak.com

Projekt WWW / Webdesign – Anka Leśniak Siedziba / Offi ce

ul. Wschodnia 29/3, 90-272 Łódź / Poland Tel./fax: +48 42 634 86 26

e-mail: journal@doc.art.pl http://www.journal.doc.art.pl Wydawca / Publisher

Stowarzyszenie Sztuka i Dokumentacja (SiD) Art & Documentation Association ul. Wschodnia 29/3, 90-272 Łódź / Poland KRS 0000328118, NIP 7252005360 http://www.doc.art.pl

Druk / Print

DRUKARNIA B3PPROJECT, ul. Sobieskiego 14, 80-216 Gdańsk http://www.b3project.com

Dystrybucja / Distribution e-mail: journal@doc.art.pl

Wydanie pisma Sztuka i Dokumentacja w wersji papierowej jest wersją pierwotną (referencyjną)

Zapraszamy do współpracy wszystkich zainteresowanych. Propozycje tematów i tekstów prosimy nadsyłać na adres siedziby redakcji. Prosimy zapoznać się z założeniami redakcyjnymi i edytorskimi znajdującymi się na stronie internetowej pisma. Artykuły w piśmie Sztuka i Dokumentacja są recenzowane. Lista recenzentów i zasady recenzowania znajdują się na stronie internetowej pisma.

Ilustracje i materiały uzupełniające znajdują się na stronie: http://www.journal.doc.art.pl/ilustracje.html

All interested in collaboration are welcome. Suggestions of topics and texts should be sent to the e-mail address of the editor. We also kindly ask to read the notes on style that can be found on our journal’s web site. Art & Documentation is a peer-reviewed journal. The list of peers and

the peer-review process are available on our web site. Illustrations and supplementary materials you can fi nd at: http://www.journal.doc.art.pl/ilustracje.html

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Spis treści / Table of Contents

ART & TEXT: CONCEPTUAL ART

Kristine Stiles, Foreword Erin Hanas, “Reconfi guring the Archive by Reconceptualizing the Ideal Academy:

Wolf Vostell’s Fluxus Zug”

John Stadler, “What Will Be: The Deferred Language of Vito Acconci” Camila Maroja, “Transforming Spectators Into Witnesses: Artur Barrio’s Bloody Bundles” Jasmina Tumbas, “Tót and TÓTal JOY of Nothing” Laura Moure Cecchini, “Vincenzo Agnetti and the Poetics of Zeroing” Amanda Suhey, “Conceptual Strategies in the Art of Guillermo Núñez:

Object, Document, Testimony & Nation”

Kency Cornejo, “No Text without Context: Habacuc Guillermo Vargas’s Exposition # 1” Jung Choi, “Conceptual Laboratory of Depth: Olafur Eliasson’s Your Atmospheric Colour Atlas” Bibliography

VARIA

Paulina Sztabińska, „Dokumentacja, ślad i kreacja artystyczna”

Bibliografi a

Katarzyna Podpora, „JAN [in the context of ] WONDERLAND – »cytat performowany«

w praktyce sztuki kontekstualnej Jana Świdzińskiego” Bibliografi a

Bartosz Zając, „Obrazy (w) historii: fi lm kompilacyjny i francusko-niemieckie kroniki

fi lmowe w latach 1940-1944” Bibliografi a

Łukasz Guzek, „Plenery w Osiekach jako model historii sztuki polskiej lat siedemdziesiątych”

Bibliografi a

Manfred Bator, “Medium, obraz czy lustro natury? Głos w dyskusji”

Bibliografi a

English Summaries Tassilo Blittersdorff , JÖRG SCHWARZENBERGER (1943 - 2013)

ARCHIWUM

Artur Tajber, „Refl eksja KONGER“ Władysław Kaźmierczak, „Manifest KONGER“

6 - 7 9 - 16 17 - 22 23 - 29 31 - 37 39 - 44 45 - 51 53 - 59 61 - 66 69 - 71 75 - 82 82 83 - 90 90 91 - 104 104 105 - 114 114 115 - 131 132 133 - 135 137 140 141

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Sztuka i Dokumentacja, nr 10 (2014) Łukasz Guzek and Małgorzata Kaźmierczak conceived of this special edition of Art and Documentation after learning about the research and articles authored by graduate students in “Art & Text: Conceptual Art,” a graduate seminar I taught in the spring of 2011 at Duke University in North Carolina, USA. The seminar examined the history and theory of Conceptual Art from the early 1960s to the present, with special attention to global conceptualisms and the role of language in visual art. Eleven students participated in the seminar and eight contributed to this special issue. Art and Documentation presents the essays in a loose historical order, from the oldest work partially conceived in 1969 by the German artist Wolf Vostell, to the most recent work by the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson realized in 2009.

Erin Hanas focuses on Vostell’s travelling installation Fluxus Zug (1981) to theorize his project as simultaneously an alternative academy (a concept based in his 1969 description of his “ideal academy”), a mobile museum (Fluxus Zug), and a conceptual approach to the archive as nomadic and calling attention to the fl ux of history and the manipulation of knowledge.

Examining what he calls the “deferred language of Vito Acconci,” John Stadler performs a close reading of Acconci’s untitled poem, “What will be” (1969), in the context of Acconci’s transition from his activity as a poet to conceptual and performance art, and his creation of what Stadler theorizes as an example of Acconci’s “index of indexes [whose] meta-indexical nature was governed by time.”

The Brazilian artist Artur Barrio began making conceptual situations in 1969, the title he gave to his actions with Bloody Bundles. These works included confronting the unsuspecting public with cloth bundles of rotting meat, bones, and blood that he left in public sites, as a commentary on the Brazilian dictatorship’s atrocities and disappeared citizens. Camila Maroja examines these works in the context of trauma and hiddenness.

Jasmina Tumbas looks at the Hungarian artist Endre Tót’s conceptual sedition, manifest in the sign of “0,” or zero, signifying the degradation of a life under State Socialism, and in his sardonic “TÓTalJOYS,” conceptual works realized principally in text, photography, and mail

KRISTINE STILES

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Sztuka i Dokumentacja, nr 10 (2014)

art. World War II laid the foundation for Tót’s work, art whose incipient birth dates from Mátyás Rákosi’s repressive regime [1949-1956] and the Hungarian revolution, and matured during the grin cut by Communism under János Kádár [1956 to1988], who lost Tót to West Germany in 1978 where he continued to be glad.

Vincenzo Agnetti also worked with the concept of “zero,” or what he called “zeroing” strategies, a proposal to rethink how language and science inform and contribute to viewers’ automatic responses to art and technology. Laura Moure Cecchini examines Agnetti’s “poetics of zeroing” and how the Italian artist altered ordinary machines and appliances, and used the zero in texts, in order to disrupt and expose the ideological constructs intrinsic to the violence of industrial alienation and its aff ect in art.

Amanda Suhey explores the work of Guillermo Núñez following the Chilean coup d’état in 1973 when Núñez shifted from painting and sculpture to conceptual strategies in his serigraphy series Libertad Condicional

(1975). Deploying photographs and texts from offi cial

documents, Núñez commented on psychological and physical torture, including his own arrest in 1974, subsequent political imprisonment in three prison camps and torture centers and exile to France in 1975.

Kency Cornejo unpacks the conceptual structure and historical context of the Costa Rican artist Habacuc Guillermo Vargas’ Exposition #1, the notorious installation he created in Nicaragua in 2007, during which he chained a homeless street dog to the gallery wall and putatively left it there to starve to death. Cornejo minutely dissects the iconography of the complex work and the media frenzy that had millions throughout the world calling for the artist’s death or criminal prosecution, while ignoring the conceptual foundations that the artist established for the work when he wrote in dog food on the gallery wall: “eres lo que lees” [you are what you read].

Finally, Jung E. Choi considers the phenomenological and conceptual approach to color in Olafur Eliasson’s Your Atmospheric Colour Atlas (2009) and how, through color, the artist challenges conventional conceptions of space in order for viewers to discover the perceptual “thickness of the fi eld-of-presence between space, time, and body.”

On behalf of these scholars and myself, I would like to thank Łukasz Guzek and Małgorzata Kaźmierczak for the opportunity to published these articles in Art and Documentation.

• Laura Moure Cecchini, doctoral candidate in Art History, Duke University.

• Jung E. Choi, doctoral candidate in Visual & Media Studies, Duke University.

• Kency Cornejo (PhD 2014), Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art at the University of New Mexico.

• Erin Hanas (PhD 2013), Editorial Associate, Books Editorial, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina. • John Stadler, doctoral candidate in the Literature

Program, Duke University.

• Amanda Suhey, doctoral candidate in Romance Studies,Duke University.

• Jasmina Tumbas (PhD 2013), Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Studies State University of New York in Buff alo.

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The German artist Wolf Vostell launched Fluxus Zug in 1981. While Vostell understood the artwork to be a travelling happening and an unconventional academy, I will present Fluxus Zug additionally to have been a conceptual, albeit temporary, museum that signifi ed the changing cultural conceptions of history, as well as an alternative, conceptual archive, which Vostell manipulated with the aim of reviving and commenting on the troubled relationship between history, memory, and the Archive.

The Container Cars of Fluxus Zug

Fluxus Zug comprised nine shipping containers — two supplied by the Deutsche Bundesbahn (DB) and seven by the Hamburg-based shipping fi rm CONTRANS — that Vostell fi lled with multi-sensorial environments and documentation. The train traveled by fl atbed railcars to sixteen cities in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) between May 1 and September 29, 1981. Fluxus Zug was open to the public for fi ve days in each city, and was either parked in a train station or in a public square or park. Vostell travelled to the cities by car, where he held press conferences and discussions with visitors. NRW’s cultural ministry fi nanced the project, while consultant Dagmar von Gottberg and CONTRANS

public relations offi cer Peter Kruse oversaw logistics and

marketing. A person designated for every city organized local cultural activities to correspond with the schedule of Fluxus Zug. Student volunteers assisted the approximately 60,000 people who visited the mobile project during its tour.1

Vostell began planning Fluxus Zug in 1979 after Gottberg and Kruse proposed circulating contemporary art throughout West Germany in CONTRANS containers. For Gottberg and Kruse, the novel idea enhanced the marketing of CONTRANS and its support of artists. For Vostell, Fluxus Zug off ered an opportunity to revisit his earlier idea for an ideal academy, which he had conceived in early 1969. Vostell’s model for an ideal academy embodied the era’s collective, utopian spirit, as well as the trend in art away from objects towards concepts. Vostell did not realize his concept for an ideal academy at the time, but the idea is preserved in an interview and drawing published in

1969 in the second issue of the journal Interfunktionen. When Vostell resurrected this model from his archive ten years later, the revolutionary fervor of 1968 had abated and object-based art, particularly painting, had taken the market by storm. I want to suggest that Vostell echoed these shifts in the market and in art itself by creating Fluxus Zug, thereby transforming his original, concept for an ideal academy into a spectacularly visual and experiential reality. Before further analyzing the conceptual origins of Fluxus Zug and how I believe it raised questions related to the archive, let me describe what visitors encountered once inside Fluxus Zug.

The public entered through the Video Library/ Communication Car (Videothek/Kommunikationswagen), which contained print materials about the project, and video and slides documenting Vostell’s past work and artistic philosophy. Visitors then proceeded through the remaining containers, which were connected end-to-end. The second container was lined with eight large paintings depicting human fi gures copulating with angels, some of which are represented wearing gas masks. Vostell attached actual plastic objects in the form of meat, or steaks, to the painted canvases sardonically underscoring the environment’s title, The Angels or My Sweet Feast for the Eyes (Die Engel oder meine süsse Augenweide). In car three, visitors encountered the theme: The Rivers or Every Person is an Artwork (Die Flüsse oder jeder Mensch ist ein Kunstwerk). Entering a long dark and narrow corridor, one could press the seventeen doorbell buttons on the walls and hear distorted excerpts of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, sung by Spanish mezzo-soprano Teresa Berganza. This strange sound played through hidden tape recorders, and eerily suggested traces of the millions transported to

and killed in concentration camps.2_{The next car was better}

lit, but exuded a feeling of postwar isolation. Enigmatically titled The Dances or Human Rights are Artworks (Die Tänze oder die Menschenrechte sind Kunstwerke), car four featured a living room setting ominously coated in concrete, the hard, intractable materiality of which transformed an intimate space for leisure into a coldly hostile environment suggestive of the site where the fundamental rights of humanity were equivocated in the family home. It equally referred to the Berlin Wall, which delineated the divide

RECONFIGURING THE ARCHIVE BY

RECONCEPTUALIZING THE IDEAL ACADEMY:

WOLF VOSTELL’S FLUXUS ZUG

ERIN HANAS

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Sztuka i Dokumentacja, nr 10 (2014) between two diff erent political systems and attitudes

towards citizens’ rights.

A Mercedes-Benz car fi lled the fi fth container. A color television embedded in the car’s grill played “moving electronic portraits” of the visitors as they entered the container, their images captured on a video camera installed on the car’s dashboard. Twenty smaller TV monitors set in the hood, roof, and trunk played static, the sound corresponding to and commenting on the environment’s title, The Winds or the Media (Die Winde oder

die Medien).3_{Mirrors on the ceiling refl ected images of the}

upturned TVs. Artifi cial fi replace logs glowed in the car’s backseat and a limbless female mannequin, connected to a monitor by a plastic tube, lay behind the vehicle on the coal-covered fl oor. Visitors tracked coal dust into car six, titled The Stones or the Ancestry of People (Die Steine oder die Herkunft des Menschen). It featured two round tables holding telephones with the bones of animals replacing or attached to many of the phone receivers; some of the phone cords connected to empty burlap coal sacks hanging on the walls.

Car seven exuded the feeling of death and the

diffi culty of communication already suggested in car six,

The Stones, where the stones, bones, and empty coal sacks were mute. Entitled The Clouds, or the Iron Curtain (Die Wolken oder der eiserne Vorhang), the environment of car seven featured ears protruding from its walls and eight mannequins lying on eight beds staggered along the walls such that visitors had to squeeze around them. Lead covered everything, and mannequins, lying in the beds and also covered with lead, were wired to move mechanically, banging against their encasements. The scene suggested

a hospital triage room, a morgue, or a collective coffi n in

which the walls literally had listened even to death. The Clouds referred to Cold War espionage and spying, not only by governments but also by the populace, and even families, listening to and reporting on each other. The ears also called attention to how what has been said and heard is altered, forgotten, and lost over time, as Jacques Derrida pointed out about the ontology of the archive whose “traces…record only what is written and processed, not

what is said and thought.”4_{After the lead-shrouded bodies}

of container seven, visitors confronted, in car eight, seven taxidermied dogs displayed lying on red, aromatic, Spanish paprika, which covered the fl oor. Vostell called this car The Fires or My Combs are Made of Sugar (Die Feuer oder meine Kämme sind aus Zucker). He added dried pepper pods hanging on strings from the ceiling and knives extending upwards from the dogs’ bodies. The ninth, and fi nal car contained enlarged black and white photographs of works that Vostell had previously realized in or designed for NRW.

The Ideal Academy

Vostell described Fluxus Zug as a mobile art

academy where people could share their experiences

and refl ections with him.5_{Topics of conversation would}

not be restricted to the subject of art, but art was to be the catalyst for discussion and learning. As Vostell

explained to a group of visitors in Dortmund, “I know that it is not beautiful. I present us with questions, about our relationship to life, to materials, to the spiritual, to nature.

I try to render psychic (seelische) events sensible.”6_He

later compared the environments to “modern fairytales,”

layered with meaning.7_{Thus did Vostell give abstract}

problems physically perceptible form in Fluxus Zug, challenging visitors to unravel their signifi cance in order to revive and re-experience history, thereby recreating the conceptual Archive. Together through open dialogue, visitors and artist were to formulate tentative responses to the questions Vostell had visualized. In the process, they would collaboratively generate new knowledge and questions about their own conditions of being, as well as belonging and responsibility to the states of collective social being. In this way, Fluxus Zug would realize an alternative academy’s overall pedagogical mission.

Learning through democratic communication and interaction was crucial for Vostell’s earlier proposed ideal academy. Vostell explained to Friedrich (“Fritz”) Heubach, in an interview in January 1969, that the ideal academy was to be an ongoing series of artistic and political interventions into everyday life in the form of a yearlong happening. Approximately twenty advisors (Berater) from disciplines ranging from the arts to the sciences would travel via automobiles or train to diff erent cities in West Germany and initiate ephemeral “learning events” (Lehrereignisse) with the public in factories, movie theaters, and banks. Vostell’s concept of the academy imagined that it would have its own doctor, sexual advisor, psychologist, electrical engineer, political scientist, and sociologist; and it would off er seminars where the public could ask any and all questions and receive answers from a variety of advisors and specialists. This, in stark contrast to the practices of traditional academies. In addition, a twenty-four-hour television and radio station would allow the public and advisors to be in constant contact, regardless of their physical proximity. After one or two years, the advisors would change and the academy could adopt a new form and communication technologies to meet the changing needs of the period and the community.

The diversity of advisors that Vostell suggested for the fi rst year underscores his broad, interdisciplinary approach to education, and his belief in art as “an egalitarian social practice grounded on the principles

of dialogue, democracy, and shared creation.”8_The

advisors included such happenings and Fluxus artists as Jean-Jacques Lebel, Allan Kaprow, Milan Knízâk, Gàbor Altorjay, George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Ben Vautier, and Henry Flynt. Appropriate to the aims of Vostell’s ideal academy, these artists de-emphasized aesthetics and the art object, but instead stressed ideas, interactivity, and provoking questions. They presented everyday actions and materials as art, and created text-based scores that could be interpreted and realized in numerous ways by anyone, depending on the breadth and invention of one’s imagination. Vostell also suggested as advisors the musicians Mauricio Kagel and Frank Zappa; Beat poet Allan Ginsberg; Interfunktionen founder Fritz Heubach; philosopher Peter Gorsen; psychoanalyst Alexander

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Mitscherlich; radiologist Joachim Gasch; and electrical engineer Peter Saage. Additionally, Vostell chose two political activists to be advisors: Fritz Teufel and Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Notably, Cohn-Bendit, a leader of the student movement in France, also advocated for educational reform and the creation of an alternative academy:

We must launch a university ourselves, on a completely new basis, even if it only lasts a few weeks….In all faculties we shall open seminars— not lecture courses, obviously—on the problems of the workers’ movement, on the use of technology in the interests of man, on the possibilities opened up by automation. And all this not from a theoretical viewpoint…, but by posing concrete problems.9

Cohn-Bendit’s and Vostell’s institutional models are similar in that both proposed emphasizing seminars, collaboration, action, and technology, and both were conceived as temporary. While Cohn-Bendit emphasized politics, Vostell framed his academy within the context of art, which a drawing he created as an appendix to his ideal academy interview highlights.

Titled “THE IDEAL ACADEMY”: AN AUTOBAHN AND HIGH-SPEED TRAIN HAPPENING! (“DIE IDEALE AKADEMIE”: EIN AUTOBAHN UND D-ZUG HAPPENING!),

the two-page drawing was printed in Interfunktionen following Vostell’s interview. The central image (printed on the left-hand page) is a map of West Germany’s autobahn network from December 1967. To the left of the map is a handwritten list of cities, each with an arrow pointing to the map, suggesting where the academy would stop during the year. Four sweeping arrows lead from the map to instructions for actions written on the opposing page. A capital “H” enclosed in a dotted line lies between the map and instructions, the symbol Vostell used to signify the site of a happening. The broken circle around the “H” suggests that while a happening is distinct from everyday life, it is not entirely separate from it, as the boundary between the two must be porous.10

A combination of theater and the visual arts, happenings were also conceptual, blurring the boundaries between artist and audience. Occurring in multiple locations, happenings involved elements of chance, and were non-linear and non-hierarchical. Allan Kaprow, who coined the term “happening” in 1959, wrote in 1961 that

happenings must also be considered “a moral act.”11_For

Vostell, happenings were also pedagogical in that they contributed to the full development of participants’ conscience by suggesting and provoking myriad Wolf Vostell’s drawing of the ideal academy, printed as the appendix to his interview with Friedrich Wolfram

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Wolf Vostell, Die Winde, fi fth container of Fluxus Zug (1981). Photo courtesy of Zentralarchiv des internationalen Kunsthandels, Cologne.

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associations across time and space, often related to life, death, and violence, as the instructions on Vostell’s ideal

academy drawing attest.12_{Notated on the drawing’s}

right-hand page, Vostell wrote:

REST STOP HELMSTEDT: CLEAN 99 door handles from 99 CARS!

ON THE SIDE OF WIESBADEN 4KM SPOON SCULPTURE

between Cologne and Düsseldorf throw gold coins out of moving car into the landscape

62 KM south of Stuttgart—lay out 1 KM of bread next to the guardrail13

The succinctness of these prompts belie the complex web of memories, experiences, and meanings that each elicits, particularly within the context of postwar West Germany.

For example, the town of Helmstedt (where people were to clean ninety-nine car door handles at the rest stop) was the site of Checkpoint Alpha, a major border crossing between West and East Germany, from the end of World War II until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Travelers who stopped there would have been visually confronted with Germany’s East/West divide and the continued presence of the Allied and Soviet militaries. Focusing on the car through the act of polishing may have triggered memories of West Germany’s so-called economic miracle of the 1950s, when cars became “not so much a matter of luxury or prestige, but what might be classifi ed as

‘necessary consumption.’”14_{Cars were also emblematic}

of Germany’s Nazi past, as Hitler had promoted the construction of national highways and aimed to provide an aff ordable car for every family: the Volkswagen, literally the “people’s car,” with Volk connoting racially pure Germans. Notably, Helmstedt is near Wolfsburg, the site of a large Volkswagen factory. Volkswagen was one of the fi rst German companies to use Soviet prisoners of war for forced labor during WWII, starting in 1941; and, beginning in 1942, it used Eastern workers, or civilians deported to Germany from the German-occupied Soviet territories

for slave labor.15_{By the late 1960s, however, Volkswagen}

vehicles had become popular among members of the counterculture. Thus, cleaning car door handles—whether done physically or conceptually—would have generated a variety of memories, ranging from the forced labor camps and Hitler’s role in developing Germany’s transportation systems to the diff erent postwar economic paths of the FRG and DDR, the two Germanys.

The “four kilometer spoon sculpture,” to be realized in Wiesbaden, similarly relates both to West Germany’s present and its Nazi past. It also referred to the arts. The idea of creating a sculpture of spoons suggests a celebration of the readymade and the ordinary as art,

in keeping with the aesthetics of Fluxus, offi cially founded

at the “Fluxus International Festival of New Music,” which took place in Wiesbaden in September 1962, and which Vostell helped to organize. Yet, the spoons could also be connected to the Nazis’ confi scation of everyday goods from those it arrested, from Jews and Roma to

leftist intellectuals, artists, and homosexuals, before transporting them all to concentration work and death camps. Recalling the masses of identical objects found at Auschwitz and elsewhere and, by the late 1960s on public display, the spoon sculpture could have symbolized the visual trace of the millions who perished in the Holocaust. Germany’s fascist past was of central concern in the 1960s, as former Nazi leaders were publicly put on trial, as West German youth rebelled against their parents’ real or perceived complicity with Nazi politics, and as West German politicians implemented emergency laws in May 1968 that granted the government more authority, which some interpreted as a return to fascism.

The Cologne and Düsseldorf actions also evoke the psychological and physical devastation of WWII and its aftermath, as well as West Germany’s contemporary art scene. The two cities on the Rhine River were largely destroyed during WWII bombing campaigns, but they had become relatively wealthy avant-garde and commercial art centers in the postwar period. Cologne was home to Mauricio Kagel’s Ensemble for New Music, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s WDR Studio for Electronic Music, prominent galleries, and the annual Cologne Art Market, which began operation in 1967. Düsseldorf was known for its Art Academy and controversial artist/professor Joseph Beuys, whose activities had inspired Heubach to publish the ideal academy issue of Interfunktionen. Although both Vostell and Beuys exhibited in galleries and profi ted from their art, they protested the commodifi cation of art and the exclusion of happenings, actions, and conceptual art from such venues as the Cologne Art Market. Throwing gold, the standard of monetary exchange, into the landscape between the two cities could be interpreted as a demonstration against capitalism, as much as a conceptual curative off ering precious metal to heal the Deutsche Heimat.

Likewise, setting bread alongside the guardrail south of Stuttgart could be considered a material off ering highlighting the dialectical juxtaposition of life and death. Placed on the side of the road, the bread could have conjured thoughts of the thousands who died in accidents

on the autobahn.16_{The bread, a nutritional staple, could}

also have summoned memories of dietary rations. Vostell similarly referred to rations in 1966 in Yellow Pages or an Action Page, a work that combined a page from the New York Yellow Pages with a 1947 German ration card advising the public to follow the ration stipulations for one month. In sticking to the rations one was asked to “enter into both the physiological conditions and mental spaces of the average German citizen” in the immediate postwar years.17

The ideal academy’s bread action could equally have called attention to hunger in Third World countries, as the media’s coverage of famines, especially in West Germany at the time, made them part of the collective consciousness and conscience. To wit, Vostell was criticized by some West Germans for wasting large amounts of foodstuff s in his art. Kym Lanzetta has argued that Vostell wanted to incite strong reactions, as he impelled people

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14

Sztuka i Dokumentacja, nr 10 (2014) to confront the excesses and wastefulness of modern daily

life through his art.18_{Using bread as an artistic material,}

he challenged the public to conceptualize the conditions that allowed for bread, a staple food, to be treated as an expendable surplus, and to refl ect upon their own wasteful actions.

Vostell acknowledged that his 1969 ideal academy was a model for Fluxus Zug in the catalog to Fluxus Zug. There he reproduced half of the Interfunktionen drawing that I just discussed, the page with the autobahn map, and the entire interview. His intentional omission of the drawing’s second page and placement of the drawing before, rather than after, the interview highlights a primary diff erence between the two academies: the one he conceptualized for Interfunktionen and the one he realized in Fluxus Zug. The former consisted primarily of immaterial experiences and conceptual actions, while the latter was comprised of the nine environment-fi lled shipping containers with which an actual public could and did interact. As noted above, this shift refl ected the resurgence of the art object in art in the 1980s. What is more, by reintroducing his ideal academy model to the public in Fluxus Zug, twenty years after the original concept appeared in Interfunktionen, Vostell signaled how he altered cultural conceptions of history and of the archive.

The Archive

The term “archive” often evokes the image of a repository of documents and records, materials conceived as the externalization of internal memories and traces of events from which history is written and on which education is based. The archive is also considered to represent the material artifacts that constitute collective

cultural memory.19_{Vostell began building such a collection}

in the mid-1950s, and in 1971, he established the Happening

Archive Berlin (HAB) in his West Berlin fl at.20_{Consisting of}

all manner of material, from copious records of his own and other artists’ work to drawings, photographs, and ephemera, Vostell transformed his private collection into a public Archive, uniting the personal with the historic, or the archive with the Archive.

Upon founding the HAB, Vostell wrote in a letter to dentist-turned-collector Hanns Sohm that the archive

would contain “a complete Vostell-documentation.”21

In theory, the archive collects an unlimited amount of information, stored in an infi nite variety of ways. However, as Derrida noted, the archive’s contents are ambiguous and fragmentary, for the archive is characterized by both the

traces of what is present and what is absent.22_{Moreover, as}

Glenn Harcourt has noted, the archive refers to “an object or process modeled by memory” that is always already in a form of “degradation and fragmentation modeled by

forgetting.”23_{For, memory is specifi c to the ways in which}

individuals remember. When something is forgotten, or even recollected, a fracture is created in the archive. Yet, it is precisely at these sites of discontinuity that the archive can be entered and an interpretation can be leveraged. One such point of disjuncture can be found in the Fluxus Zug catalog where the ideal academy interview

and drawing were reproduced in an altered form from the original Interfunktionen publication. Vostell’s deletion of the second page of the ideal academy drawing from the Fluxus Zug catalog may be understood as a selective manipulation of the archive and as an attempt to rewrite the historical record. Only 250 copies of the ideal academy issue of Interfunktionen were published in 1969, so relatively few have seen Vostell’s complete drawing, printed after his interview. In comparison, while it is unknown how many of the approximately 60,000 visitors to Fluxus Zug looked through or purchased a Fluxus Zug catalog, the number was likely greater than 250. This means the altered ideal academy drawing and interview are better known than the original.

The Fluxus Zug catalog does not simply register

the creation of another fi ssure in the archive or even the reinterpretation of a historical document; it also underscores a shift from historical to geographic thinking, a shift that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari articulated in “Rhizome,” an essay that appeared in West Germany in 1977. Drawing metaphors and models from nature and contemporary artists’ practices (especially from artists involved with happenings, Fluxus, and conceptual art, such as Vostell and the artists he named as advisors for the ideal academy), Deleuze and Guattari introduced “concepts like ‘nomadic,’ the model of the ‘tuber’ rather than the root, of ‘proliferation’ rather than growth, of the ‘rhizome’ rather than the tree model and a new relationship of individual and collective in a ‘rhizomatic practice’.” They also challenged

the need to show linear historical development.24_Instead

of family trees, depicting a hierarchical chain of progress, maps, which are dynamic, non-hierarchical, and have myriad starting points, were viewed as a more appropriate way of representing genealogies.

Thus, when Vostell repositioned the map of his ideal academy before the interview text in the 1981 catalog, he signaled a rhizomatic, geographical conception of history. The ideal academy from 1969 was a model for Fluxus Zug, but it was not the only model. There was no single, linear narrative that ran from the ideal academy to Fluxus Zug, just as the ideal academy map visualized how there was no single route that the academy could have traveled around West Germany. In this regard, I would argue that the Fluxus Zug catalog provides a metaphorical map of the journey Vostell embarked on in creating his mobile academy. In addition to the ideal academy drawing and interview, there are numerous images of artworks by Vostell and other artists that incorporated trains, images of artworks by Vostell that included maps or various communication technologies, and fragments of erotic imagery from ancient Greece. There are also photographs of trains and train tracks taken during both World Wars and the Cold War. Their presence in the catalog suggests that they were all starting points for diff erent aspects of Fluxus Zug. Indeed, there are traces of them in the environments that comprised Fluxus Zug, as well as in the project’s overall design.

Additional images in Vostell’s archive further highlight the proliferation of imagery that he drew upon. For example, the mannequin behind the car in Die Winde

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15

refers to the cover image of the April 13, 1981 issue of Der Spiegel, depicting Gudrun Ensslin being force-fed for a story about whether it was torture to force-feed captured members of the left-wing Red Army Faction (or Baader-Meinhof Gang). For the organization of the “bodies” in Die Wolken, Vostell was inspired by a photograph of a police investigator photographing individuals in a New York morgue. The specifi city of the images did not necessarily concern Vostell. Rather, he used them as archival images for the construction of environments that conjured memories of the millions tortured and killed across temporal and geographical boundaries, their deaths leaving traumatic voids in the archive. In such evocations, Vostell encouraged Fluxus Zug visitors to arrive at their own associations among experimental art, German history, and contemporary politics. In addition, in the context of archival research, he asked viewers to consider how such archival material itself contributes to troubling the archive and the writing of history.

In both his ideal academy and Fluxus Zug, Vostell constructed and orchestrated unexpected juxtapositions of imagery and concepts that weld history together in new confi gurations, and open interpretation out to the continuities of otherwise apparently disconnected histories. By conceiving of both academies as nomadic and temporary, Vostell called attention to how history and knowledge are in a state of constant fl ux and themselves constitute fl uid concepts to be manipulated and reformed.

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ENDNOTES

1_{Bertram Müller, “Das Happening und seine Erben,” Rheinische Post (Leverkusen) (September 25, 1981); and Stefan Klute, interview with the author,}

December 3, 2010.

2_{Heiner Stachelhaus, “Das Lachen bleibt im Hals stecken” NRZ (1981): 21.}

3_{According to Klute, the TVs were meant to play distorted television programs. Due to technological problems, they mostly played static. Interview}

with the author.

4_{Sue Breakell, “Perspectives: Negotiating the Archive,” Tate Papers (Spring 2008): http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/08spring/}

breakell.shtm. See also, Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

5_{Dagmar von Gottberg, ed., Vostell Fluxus Zug (Berlin: Verlag Fröhlich & Kaufmann, 1981).}

6_{“Ja, ich weiß, daß das nichts Schönes ist. Ich stelle Fragen an uns, nach unserem Verhältnis zum Leben, zum Materiellen, zum Geistigen, zur Natur. Ich}

versuche, seelische Ereignisse bewußt zu machen.” Stachelhaus, “Das Lachen bleibt im Hals stecken.”

7_{Heiner Schürbusch, “Grosser Bahnhof für die Kunst,” Bunte Wochen-Zeitung (May 2-8, 1981): 12.}

8_{Antje Kramer, “The Artist as Teacher: On the Egalitarian Myths of Art Education after 1960,” Arts & Societies Seminar 37 (April 27, 2011): http://www.}

artsetsocietes.org/a/a-kramer.html.

9_{Daniel Cohn-Bendit interview by Jean-Paul Sartre (May 20, 1968), in Jeremi Suri, ed., The Global Revolutions of 1968 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007),}

140.

10_{See Richard Langston, “The Art of Barbarism and Suff ering,” in Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures, ed. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann}

(New York: Abrams, 2009), 251-2.

11_{Allan Kaprow, “Happenings in the New York Scene,” in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press,}

2003), 21.

12_{José Antonio Agúndez García, 10 Happenings von Wolf Vostell, trans. Helmtrud Rumpf (Mérida: Junta de Extremadura, 2002), 63.}

13_{RASTSTÄTTE HELMSTEDT: 99 Türklinken von 99 AUTOS PUTZEN!; VON WIESBADEN SEITLICH 4KM LÖFFELPLASTIK; zwischen Köln und Düsseldorf}

gold-Münzen in die Landschaft aus fahrenden AUTO werfen!; 62 KM südlich von Stuttgart—1 KM mit Brot auslegen neben der Leitplanke.

14_{Arnold Sywottek, “From Starvation to Excess? Trends in the Consumer Society from the 1940s to the 1970s,” in The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of}

Western Germany, 1949-1968, ed. Hanna Schissler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 346.

15_{Volkswagen AG, Place of Remembrance of the History of Forced Labor for the Volkswagen Factory (Wolfsburg: Volkswagen AG, 1999).}

16_{There were approximately 8,000 traffi}_{c fatalities annually in the early 1950s, 12,800 by 1956, and 190,000 in 1972. Thomas Zeller, Driving Germany:}

The Landscape of the German Autobahn, 1930-1970 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 196.

17_{Kristine Stiles, “Between Water and Stone: Fluxus Performance, A Metaphysics of Acts,” in In the Spirit of Fluxus, ed. Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan}

Rothfuss (Minneapolis: Walker Art Museum, 1993), 72.

18_{Kym Lanzetta, “The Aesthetics of Sacrifi ce in Heiner Müller, Wolf Vostell, Anselm Kiefer, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder” (PhD diss., University of}

Chicago, 2008), 168.

19_{Glenn Harcourt, “Some Notes on the Archive,” X-tra (Spring 2012): 15.}

20_{Today the HAB, now called the Archivo Happening Vostell, is in the Museo Vostell Malpartida, Spain.}

21_{Wolf Vostell, letter to Hanns Sohm, June 27, 1971. From Archiv Sohm, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Notably, Vostell mentored Sohm on the development}

of his (Sohm’s) archive.

22_{Derrida, Archive Fever.} 23_{Ibid., 16.}

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17 WHAT WILL BE:

THE DEFERRED LANGUAGE OF VITO ACCONCI

JOHN STADLER

Most criticism makes only fl eeting reference to Vito Acconci’s formal poetic training when considering his conceptual works, suggesting poetry and conceptual art

are two entirely separate practices.1_{This disarticulation is}

unproductive, though, given conceptual art’s engagement with language. Perhaps critics took Acconci at his word when he stated fi rmly that he was no longer a poet after 1969: “Once I had gotten out of poetry, I would probably have had at the back of my mind, don’t get into anything that has any

resemblance to my literature background.”2_{Nevertheless, on}

this point he often wavered: “Okay, this interest in movement.

Trace it back to poetry, movement over a page.” 3_{Or, perhaps,}

the lack of an archive for Acconci’s collected poetry prior to 2006 explains the paucity of scholarship bridging these two

voices of Acconci together.4_{Whatever the reason, Acconci (the}

poet) and Acconci (the conceptual artist) rarely are brought into conversation. Yet these practices are complementary, and this essay reunites the two aspects of the poet/artist. In 2004, Acconci’s notes and documentation for conceptual works came out in Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body 1969 -1973, with an introduction by Gregory Volk, followed in 2006, by an extensive collection of Acconci’s poetry in Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci, edited by Craig Dworkin. I examine two less well-known works from these archives to draw connections between Acconci’s poetry and conceptual art. Through this trans-discursive analysis, I argue that Acconci pointedly critiques language as a system of deferral and indeterminacy, questioning its capacity for representation.

Poetry as Conceptual Art

The tension in how to read a poem whose literal register

overshadows its fi gurative quality dominates Acconci’s

untitled poem, referred to hereafter as “What will be.” (Fig. 1) The lack of a proper title should not be ignored, since the act of not naming initiates a procedural poem whose primary interest centers on the act of naming. In a series of thirty

dependent clauses, Acconci anticipates “What will be the nth

word” of an advertisement.5_{Here Acconci makes an implicit}

contract: if the reader elects to locate

Figure 1:

Announcing an advertisement that will appear in The New York Times6_.

these words, for which Acconci provides the page numbers in Webster’s Dictionary, s/he will know the poem’s hidden message. If the reader elects not to do so, then only the cipher exists; the encoded message remains unrealized. How should the agency of the reader be conceived, though? There is never an addressee to these statements (neither a you, I, nor he/she/ it are beckoned to fulfi ll an action). These words will simply “appear,” Acconci promises, contingent upon the subjectless dependent clauses that harken their very manifestation. He never insists that the reader bring forth additional language. It is as though the statement that words will be can bring them into existence. Because Acconci’s diction passively negates the role of the subject at the same time that it necessarily requires it, he cleverly incites the reader into action.

I located a 1966 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary and set about constructing the poem’s hidden subject, what might be considered its “other.” What emerged, as the text promised, was an advertisement for women’s clothing. The errors that Acconci wove into these instructions are worth noting, including mislabeled page numbers (11),

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18

Sztuka i Dokumentacja, nr 10 (2014) missing instructions (12), incorrect words (18, 19, 23), and

additional or convoluted directions (13, 14, 20, 24, 28, 29). These errors highlighted Acconci’s interrogation into the fi xity of language by pointing to a system fraught with inconsistency. Despite the hindrances in the procedural system, once translated, the poem is compellingly coherent. In “What will be,” a literal reading of the text is vexed without the reader’s participation, which relied on various assumptions, leaps of faith, and associative guesswork. These exchanges between the reader and author lend the poem a dynamism that is akin to collaboration.

To consider what Acconci asks of language and poetry, I off er the following chart that maps the extant of the poem’s cipher words beside their decoded referents. (Fig. 2) If this poem were simply an advertisement, as Acconci claims in the fi rst line, it might be read as nothing more than an appropriation in the spirit of Duchamp’s Fountain (1917). Such a comparison is inadequate, though, because Duchamp positioned the status of Fountain as art via the context he established through his intention, naming, and signature. Something diff erent is at work in how Acconci presents the advertisement as poem. In this case, not naming the text became a critical decision. Furthermore, the procedure employed fuses the intention of the reader with that of the artist (the desire to complete the poem). This distributed network of participation grants the poem its gravitas.

Acconci’s poem operates like the Oulipian writing practice n + 7. This writing constraint involves the deliberate de-familiarization of a source text by modifying nouns with the use of a dictionary: every noun (n) in a text is replaced by the seventh noun to follow its entry in a dictionary. Larger dictionaries produce less radical transformations

Announcement Advertisement frederiksberg free

catalo catalog iris green Irish handworker handwoven twee tweed la-di-da ladies suipestifer infection suit ancyroid & coastwise coat custody custom tailordom tailored dollarleaf $ forty-three 42 senatus consultum send FOQ for frederiksberg free

milk milkadder / mail ordeal tree order

catalc catalog ancyroid & swat swatch jack winter Jacob’s LTA Ltd. tail of the eye Tailor FOQ for sixtine 60 daws / dawsonia Dawson SSW / streen St. dubitative Dublin ireful Ireland Figure 2:

Cipher and deciphered text of poem, lineated.7

than smaller dictionaries. These texts are not entirely divorced from their original, and often retain either the charge of meaning (by way of etymological and lexical similitude) or the sonic resonance of the transformed text, revealing both the variant and homologous qualities of language. So while the overall meaning of the second text is drastically altered, a connection to the prior version remains. For example, read the code on the left column and then the translated advertisement in the right. Note the homologies and variance. I have drawn out this examination to reveal how Acconci departs from Duchamp. While Acconci appropriates an advertisement, his appropriation is inherently transformed, not just from its original context (the newspaper) but also from its original form (the advertisement). The initial poem—itself a kind of mistranslation—operates as a reverse n + 7 process, whereby the duplicate precedes the original.

But what does this say about language? Acconci’s poem achieves one of his most valued ambitions for language, to cover a page. Through the serialized instructions, he has fi lled the page with inscription, given the reader many more words than are necessary to relay what is, in essence, a much simpler text. In the process of covering the page, Acconci acknowledges the infl uence of concrete poetry and imagistic play, most clearly through the repetition of the words “What will be” and “appears after,” which operate as visual anchors throughout the poem. The more complicated the instruction, the longer the line runs (usually because of an error), spilling over into a second line, which disrupts the repetition of negative space between words of these left-justifi ed refrains. Thus the poem devolves from a kind of structured space to a more chaotic space as it covers the page.

Readerly expectation is radically altered throughout this process to force the reader to reconsider the very nature of poetry, which grants it its conceptual lens. Acconci presents several decision points for the reader to deliberate on in order to produce sense in the meaning of the text. The fi rst question is whether to accept the cipher as the complete text or to decipher it. If the task is accepted, the second choice concerns which dictionary to use, as Acconci did not specify an edition. If the “wrong” dictionary were selected, the result would be the multiplication of errata and the breakdown of the instructions. As an example, when Acconci informs

the reader that the 18th_{word will appear after milk on}

page 1361, one of these two bits of information appears incorrect. If, for instance, I select the word after milk, I receive “milkadder,” but if I proceed to page 1361, I fi nd “mail.” The next clue reveals the word “order,” which then

allows me to deduce that the 18th_{word should be “mail,”}

not “milkadder.” However, considering again “milkadder” as a homophonic translation of “mail order,” both share the same basic consonant and vowel structure, as well as syllabic count. Acconci loves to play word games of

this kind.8_{The reader is left with a sense of uncertainty.}

Even when the poem is considered in the context of advertisement, it does not always clearly add up, especially near the conclusion, where the text reads “Jacob’s / Ltd. / Tailor / for / 60 / Dawson / St. / Dublin / Ireland.” Here, the